Copyright New York Times Company Jun 3, 2004Kristal Johnson nestled deep into the sofa between her mother and her foster mother and listened to the two women laugh about how she used to try playing one against the other.
There was the time when Kristal, now a poised 18-year-old, skipped chores at the home of her foster mother, Janet Stevens, and was told that she could not go to a party her boyfriend was having.
Naturally, Kristal, who was scheduled for a weekend visit to her mother, Bernadette Blount, tried to get a second opinion. But Ms. Stevens had already called ahead. ''She told me what had happened and asked me if I agreed with the punishment or if it was too harsh,'' Ms. Blount recalled. ''I said, 'Oh, no, you are right. I'll back you up.' ''
This scene of parental solidarity speaks to a minirevolution in foster care, one being led by New York City. Fifteen years ago, it would have been hard to find a place in the nation that encouraged foster parents and birth parents to meet, let alone talk. Child welfare literature commonly held that birth parents -- especially those like Ms. Blount, who admitted that she had beaten her daughter -- could be dangerous or might try to take their children. Moreover, it was dogma that children would adjust better to living with foster parents if the separation from the birth home was swift and total.
But in 1998, New York was among the first cities to adopt an approach to foster care that actively nurtures open relationships between foster and birth parents.
In this model, which takes a page from the latest thinking in divorce custody cases, not only do the birth parents know where the foster parents live, they share in the decision making on everything from discipline to breakfast cereal.
In the best cases, like that of Ms. Stevens and Ms. Blount, the foster parent remains a source of support and counsel after the child returns to the birth parent, as most do.
Now after six years, with some 28,000 families having participated in the program, the city's departing commissioner of children's services points to the growth of the program as among the achievements he is most proud of. ''For many parents, it has demystified foster care,'' said the commissioner, William C. Bell, who will step down in a few weeks. ''In surveys, parents report a much more positive experience with the system and their caseworkers. Children are returned home on average three months earlier.''
The family-to-family strategy, as it is called, is considered so promising that it has already been adopted by 35 cities and counties in 16 states. And in July, Mr. Bell will become executive vice president of Casey Family Programs, a nonprofit Seattle group that develops and finances child welfare programs across the country, hoping to bring the model to the rest of the nation. ''We don't ever want a situation where a parent has a kid and doesn't know where they are placed,'' he said.
Proponents of this intimate approach argue that it is urgent to expand it now, as a record 300,000 children a year are being taken into foster care across the nation, in part because of a 1997 federal law encouraging adoptions that urges states to remove children in potentially dangerous family circumstances.
Because family to family increases contact between birth parents and children, they say, it improves the likelihood that the family will reunite. They say the program also helps birth parents who are never going to regain custody terminate their parental rights so their child can be adopted, because they are more confident that their child is going to a good home. Most important, they argue, it makes the separation less traumatic for children.
But the program has its opponents, including cities that resist it because it requires significant funds for retraining social workers and foster parents, many of whom now see the birth parents as enemies.
''Foster families came to see themselves as saviors of the children,'' said John B. Mattingly, director of human services reform at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a Baltimore philanthropy, which he led in pioneering the family-to-family concept. Many found it hard to become mentors for the adults they were taught to revile, he said, and with a nationwide shortage of foster parents, this resistance can scare localities from mandating relationships.
New York has fought against this ingrained suspicion by training foster parents and the contract agencies that handle foster care in the city to accept the notion that almost all parents deserve to maintain contact with their children, no matter the reason they lost the child. The program is open to all parents on a voluntary basis, except when prohibited by order of a family court judge, and currently, the commissioner said, some 60 percent of the families who have a child in foster care have at least met the foster parent.
''We have to work really hard not to demonize the parents,'' said Mary Odom, who runs the foster parent program at St. Christopher-Ottilie, the city-contracted agency that works with Ms. Stevens. ''We have had a 6-month-old come in with gonorrhea of the mouth, so it is not easy. But it always turns out that it is cyclical. There are no bad people, just bad acts.''
Ms. Blount, for example, lost Kristal and her three younger children to foster care in 1999, when Kristal came to school with golf-ball-size welts on her arms and shoulders. Ms. Blount had been beating her with a belt. Then an unemployed single mother of four at age 31, Ms. Blount says that she just lost control and needed help. Still, she was furious when the city decided to take her children into care instead of giving her support in her home.
Her volatile anger at the city and at her children creates the type of circumstance that often leads parents to disobey court orders, alienate child-care workers and lose their children to foster care for additional years. But under the family-to-family system, Ms. Blount met with caseworkers and with the foster family to discuss the future of her children.
At such conferences, the birth mother can exchange information with the foster mother in a controlled setting, explaining that her child sleeps with a nightlight and hates pizza or peanut butter. The mother can express preferences for church attendance or hair styles. She can also build a connection to her child's new caregiver, and vice versa.
''I met Mama J.,'' Ms. Blount said of this first encounter with Ms. Stevens, ''and the first thing she said was, 'I don't want your children to live with me forever, so you figure out how to get them back.' It made me laugh, and it was such a relief, you know, that she did not want to take them from me.''
These family team conferences are the official structure by which families meet, but within the discretion of the agency and foster parent, an informal relationship is also encouraged. Ms. Stevens gave Ms. Blount her phone number and address. During the year and a half that Ms. Stevens kept Kristal and her younger sister, Desirae (two younger boys stayed with Ms. Blount's mother), she and the two girls talked to Ms. Blount almost daily by phone.
And before Ms. Blount received visitation rights at her home, she traveled from the South Bronx to Ms. Stevens's apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, to cook dinners, braid her children's hair and just hang out.
The relationship continued after the children went home. When Ms. Blount could not get them to clean up as they had in Ms. Stevens's apartment, she called for advice. ''Take away outside time with friends for the weekend,'' Ms. Stevens told her. ''That'll do it.'' And it did.
Ms. Stevens also plays another pivotal role: when Ms. Blount feels she is losing control, she sends one or both of her daughters to their foster parent while she cools off. When Desirae threw a neighbor's cellphone out a window, in 2002, Ms. Stevens took her back for several months.
The girls treat Ms. Stevens like family. Sometimes they call to complain about their mother and ask her to referee an argument. Sometimes they just go over to hang out and have dinner. Kristal refers to Ms. Stevens's daughter and a foster teenager staying in the home as sisters. They share Timberland shoes and gather in the kitchen to complain about Ms. Stevens's strictness.
Of course, not every relationship is as smooth as theirs. Many of the foster care agencies around the city recount at least one instance where a drug-addled or mentally ill birth parent went to the foster home in the middle of the night and pounded on the door and made threats. But so far there have been no disasters.
A much more common problem is that a drug-addicted parent does not visit much, if at all. But even sad situations have a bright side, Ms. Odom insists. ''It may help a parent to understand that they can't care for their child and that someone else can do a great job,'' she said. ''We terminate rights just as much now as before family-to-family. It is just easier for everyone this way.''
| [Photograph] |
| Latonya Baskerville, left, with her son Tyshawn, who lived with Harold and Willa White for five months while she stopped using drugs. (Photo by Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times)(pg. B10); For Kristal Johnson, center, and her mother, Bernadette Blount, right, Kristal's foster mother, Janet Stevens, has become a part of the family. (Photo by Andrea Mohin/The New York Times)(pg. A1) |